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February 2003

Dear Mr. Richardson:
I am happy to report that your manuscript, “Web Logs in the English
Classroom: More Than Just Chat,” has been accepted for publication in English Journal. In an effort to correspond in a timely fashion, your official acceptance letter has been attached to this email…

Ok, I’m stunned. And happy. (And I hate the title.) And the best part…I think there’s still more to come…soon. (Update: The article will run in the September issue.)

We’re in a middle of an explosion right now. In the last few weeks, things have just gone crazy. It’s unbelievable to see what’s going on now…It’s in the air. Maybe it is. When we look back, it’s going to be hard to tell which one of all the different things that are going on [had the most impact]. But there’s just a lot more interest in Weblogs right now. From all corners.

I’ve gotten a smattering of e-mails in the last few days from teachers wanting to know more about Web logs and blogging. I think more and more people are starting to catch on to the potential, and I also think this is a great opportunity for eBN to establish itself as the support network it’s intended to be. The new look Web site, the publicity of late, and all of our good thinking seems to be gelling together at the right time.

Anne includes some excerpts of e-mails she’s been exchanging with teachers across the country, and one strikes me:

Some say weblogs would certainly lead to some revolutions in publishing given the speed it grows. I’m not that worried. However, I do want to try some blogging. I’m wondering whether those who have tried can share their experience of implementing weblogs in teaching.

That is exactly what eBN is about…I’m wondering if Pat or others have some ideas for beginning to gather that content, and whether we need to solicit some article ideas, set some deadlines, and just develop the content in general. Suggestions?
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There is a convergance happening in my brain (a scary thought to begin with) with this whole RSS piece and the other nascent multimedia Web log work we’ve been engaging in lately. Pam‘s been audioblogging, and today Tim includes a video clip into his post. in Jenny‘s “Aggregating Your Life Into One Page” post yesterday, one of the comments she got was from Ryan Greene who said

Jenny – You forgot getting feeds from your favorite bands as to their new releases and remixes, new episodes of video and audio blogs, including the kid’s school reports. I mean, why not teach your kids how to do multimedia blogging if the tech is there, and they have an interest in learning to use it?

This morning, George is writing about meeting the needs of different types of learners, and he says

5% of the populace (probably even less) can create. The others watch, listen, read, consume. I think one of the destinies of digital technology is to enable the other 95% to express their creativity somehow. That’s the gestalt view. Digital cameras, story telling, assembling stuff from existing content, annotating, reviews, conversations, linking topics together – are all forms of creativity. That’s what our tools are all about. There’s plenty of image, audio and video editing software out there. Now is the time to integrate and aggregate media, communications and personal publishing.

I always love when things just seem to connect like that, and one of the best things about Web logs is the ability to bring that connection into formal existence and to think more deeply about it in writing. (I need to ask my students to do more of this.)

I still haven’t digested the implications of all of this, and I think someday it’s going to be interesting (to me at least) to look back on these posts and watch the evolution of this still fuzzy picture into reality. How cool is that going to be?
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Now take another giant leap for mankind and imagine a news aggregator that has your local newspaper’s headlines, news from your municipality, programs you’ve noted interest in from the park district, announcements from both your kid’s school and teacher, status reports from your kids’ sports teams, a notice of the “special of the day” from the local coffee shop you love, and on and on and on.

Funny thing is I was talking to our librarian about this concept today and I could see her eyes getting wide. I’m not sure if she was understanding the ways this might change the way she informs the school community (shifting?) or if she didn’t understand what I was trying to say. Either way, whether she knows it or not, next fall, she’s going to have a newsfeed, and she’ll have some subscribers as well. Mark my words.

I think I’m starting to understand why Jenny and so many others are really hot on RSS and its potential. The more I mull over the scenarios of how it might work in the classroom, the more interested I get.

Aside from the rather mundane (at this point) concept of having kids subscribe to different feeds for information gathering and research purposes, the whole idea of using RSS for basically schoolwide communication is really wild. I know that I’m assuming a lot here, like teachers and administrators and parents will a) be open to the technology and b) care enough to use it. But I see some real positives: the ability to receive and generate highly specific information about topics/areas that concern you; the archiving of that information for easy recall; a huge reduction in the need for e-mail; more that I haven’thought of yet. Now I’m starting to understand what CMS really means.

The best part is that I don’t think it’s that far off. But Dave needs to build a few more pieces into the RSS part of Manila to really make it work. First, and maybe this is already a part of it, we’ve got to be able to serve up each category or department as a separate feed. (I keep picturing this long menu list of feeds that we could subscribe to with all those little xml buttons beside it…or maybe something like this.) Also, I think I read somewhere that it’s now possible to comment back to a post right through the aggregator. That’s a must as well…the more seamless the better.

RSS is going to be huge, I think. Dave points to Spartanburg Herald-Journal using it to feed job openings to people. Think of how much time and effort that saves…open up the feed, search for your job key words, done.

(BTW, more on RSS here published by the Utah state gov. with a veerrryyy interesting addendum here.)

Pat and Seb (welcome back!) both point to more development comments by Dave Winer, this time referring to an RSS Aggregator feature in Manila. (And, btw, it looks like Pam has him working on Audblog integration, at least with Radio.) Aside from the tempered excitement I’m feeling about his renewed interest in the tool, this latest “improvement” has some really interesting potential.

I’ve been trying to find a way to introduce RSS to my students…it’s just such a fit for journalism in terms of bringing the news to the student instead of the other way around. (Don’t get me wrong; we can never overteach research skills.) But all of the decent RSS aggregators out there require some type of software installation on the machine. That’s an issue since we correctly don’t want to overload classroom computers with a lot of stuff that only small segments of the student population will use.

But Dave is integrating aggregator right into the software:

This is an experiment. I’ve wanted to try this out for quite some time — it’s a mini-aggregator in a Manila site. A managing editor selects feeds for a news page for his or her community. This means that people can learn about and enjoy a news aggregator without having to install and run one on their own.

How cool would that be? As an ME, I could set them up with a few basic feeds…NY Times, Monitor, etc. Then, they could add to it as they develop their beats and interests. They could add feeds from classmates’ Web logs. Heck, they could even get feeds generated from me, or the school.

And this is where it really starts to gel for me. In that interview that I mentioned yesterday, the thing that really pushed my thinking on this was when he said “Ultimately it’s going to be a basic skill like e-mail or using a word processor. It’s going to be like writing…” Um, yeah…even more. What if we could set it up so that a student has a Web log that is her log in page when she enters the network. Each morning, the aggregators collect headlines or stories from sites she’s interested in. She also get feeds from her teachers, and news and or announcements from the school. She uses the Web log as an online electronic portfolio, and by generating separate feeds for separate “departments,” her teachers, mentors, counselors, etc. can aggregate only the relevant information they need. All of her homework could be turned in through the Web log. All of the feedback and response could be stored there as well. And parents could watch the whole thing develop.

It’s a whole new paradigm of sharing and transmitting information. Might not be that great of a leap for most, and it’s there’s still a lot of work to be done, but this whole thing continues to open my eyes.
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Do you think the blog will have a similarly profound effect on education? Will the trend spread from Harvard?
It will. Absolutely. I’ve already gotten e-mail from tons of educational institutions that want to be up on what we’re doing. And many are way ahead of the curve with Web logs. Harvard has extra significance because it’s not just any university. It’s a very influential place.

Ok…let’s try to find out where those guys are who are ahead of the curve…

What exactly will your role be at Harvard?
I will be an evangelist and an educator and a scholar. I hope I’m here to learn as much as I am to teach. After doing all this software for all these years, I haven’t spent that much time with users. And the problems have been largely technical–how do we do these things,? What are the basic features, and how do we tie them together? Now I want to be on the other side of the fence and see how a community reacts to this. How can it be better? What are the barriers? I want to learn, and then share what I’ve learned. You publish and let every one know what you’ve learned.

Sounds familiar…

…how has the medium or format evolved? Ultimately it’s going to be a basic skill like e-mail or using a word processor. It’s going to be like writing, and that’s why I’m at a university now. We’ll teach all the students and the teachers how to do it, and in turn they’ll teach their students. So we’re getting ready for the long haul here.

Just a funny Web log moment…Called Tim Lauer today who had e-mailed me after I posted on his Tag Board that I would be at his presentation in SF at the ASCD convention a week from Saturday. I’ve done this a couple of times now, called someone and said, “Hey, this is Will Richardson,” and there’s that split second hesitation on the other end like “ok I know the name, but…” and I have to say “the guy from Weblogg-ed” and then the light goes off. I guess bloggers might be better off with site name first, real name second.
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At some point this morning when I was responding to my Journalism 1 kids’ first stories, I actually blurted out something like “God, I love Manila.” Didn’t think I’d ever say that, but now that I’ve really rolled up my sleeves a bit, I’m realizing what an amazing tool it is. My students are flourishng with it. Problems are minimal. The kids ask me to teach them tweaks. It’s become a very creative, supportive environment, and the Web logs are a big piece of that. I’m at the point where someone’s going to have to show me a lot to make me believe there is a better alternative out there.

Anyway, I’m looking and reading all this stuff today about assessment and Web portfolios and teacher practice and I’m not believing how well this tool meshes with all of that. And more…the mentoring and collaborative nature of Web logs, thoroughly discussed here, adds a whole new important dimension to the concept.

And I’m also not believing that there aren’t more people out there making the connection. The article ref’ed above is only six months old, yet not one mention of Web logs. This great article in Syllabus from December with literally a ton of resources makes no mention of Web logs. Helen Barrett, whose work on electronic portfolios is ground breaking, hasn’t broken Web log ground as far as I can tell. Still amazing.

When I mention the idea of kids building online portfolios from elementary through middle through high school and on to college, people just shake their heads in wonder. Can we even imagine what that might look like? How teachers might use and build on that performance? How kids might reflect on and grow from their own work?

I’m not saying Manila is necessarily the tool to do that. But it does allow one to think out of the box, and that’s worth $299 a year in itself.
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Aside from everything that comes with my first official day on the new job, I’ve been thinking a lot (more) lately about the content of the eBN site, and it’s obvious others are as well. The recent discussions on MT, Al’s new questions on the eBN Wiki FAQ (say that three times fast) show the scope of what lay ahead. I’m gonna propose another Wiki (as much as I’m not sure what to think about Wikis I keep on using them, don’t I?) to collect some content ideas. While I know time is short for all of us, maybe we could start knocking off some of these pieces in preparation for the site design. Just a thought.

Also, I’ve been thinking that since many of us feel the need to publish, we should probably think of a way to coordinate our efforts in terms of topics and markets. Again, just a thought looking for some feedback.
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A new news aggregator that if it lives up to it’s description could be extremely interesting.

NewsMonster offers a superior web experience and outstanding integration with existing websites and weblogs that support RSS. Even sites that don’t support RSS can work with NewsMonster. [Emphasis mine.]That’s not all! NewsMonster incorporates an advanced reputation system to prevent spam and discover and inform you of important news.

The interface and the results are outstanding…I’m thinking of using this for my student Web log aggregation if I can figure out a way to use access the same page from my laptop.
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Got the comments tweak done (thanks to Ed my tech guy), and, if for no other reason, this makes me happy because it’s some development of the software. And from reading Joe and Sarah today, it appears at least that MT, while a feature rich alternative, may not be a better answer for the classroom. (BTW, the content of those two posts is exactly what we should start saving and developing for the eBN site, I think. At some point, we should have a list of pros and cons for all the software packages teachers are currently using: Manila, MT, Blogger, PostNuke, p-machine, etc.)

One note about the comment feature. I like it here where I am not as concerned about who is commenting on my stuff. I’m not sure it’s the better choice for student sites. I’d rather at the minimum people join the site before commenting. (Still, I’d like the ability somehow to vet potential members before allowing them to post. I haven’t had any issues with this yet, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed…another slice of content for the eBN site…)